Promoting Plurilingual and Intercultural Knowledge Using Educational Escape Rooms in French Lessons: An Intervention Study on the Use of Digital Learning Environments

Abstract

Plurilingual approaches are officially part of the curriculum for foreign languages and are also required by the Council of Europe. Although these official guidelines do exist, they are often not implemented by foreign language teachers. This also applies to digital tools: even though digital tools are quite common now, most of them do not integrate plurilingual approaches but instead teach languages through a monolingual lens, i.e. one other language only. This chapter focuses on a case study of educational escape games located in French cities, analyzing the digital aspects, the plurilingual approaches and the enjoyability (fun factor) regarding students’ progress in French. Moreover, it examines whether they themselves find the plurilingual approaches helpful during their learning process. The digital educational escape games are immersive and do not only contain plurilingual approaches but also intercultural aspects. The students in the case study that took place in Germany gave their feedback via a multiple-choice questionnaire in a pre-post design. The survey included 77 language learners aged between 13 and 17 in five different learning groups. The results show a positive correlation between the use of the escape rooms and the perception of the plurilingual tasks as well as between the use of the escape rooms and the perception of intercultural and immersive learning.